The present invention relates to digital certificates, and is particularly directed to a distributed digital certificate validation method and system.
In a typical known digital certificate validation method, a certificate validation service runs on a host which is centrally located relative to a number of clients. Each client operates independently of the host. When needed, each client can connect on-line to the host to obtain certificate validation results in real-time.
A drawback in known digital certificate validation methods is that the client needs to connect and communicate with the host each time the client needs to validate a certificate. Since the client operates independently of the host and usually has limited resources, it may be quite inefficient for the client to make the connection and communicate with the host each time a certificate validation result is needed. It would be desirable to provide a more efficient digital certificate validation method and system.